Scope Basel 2009

Scope does the most satellite art fairs: Besides the third edition here in Basel, currently they are also in New York, Miami, the Hamptons and London. Now it is conveniently located a two minutes walk from Art Basel on Sportplatz Landhof.

This time Scope is showcasing Art Asia, featuring a number of Asian galleries. Overall, there were 110 galleries form 20 countries.

The most interesting work was by the artist duo Comenius Roethlisberger & Admir Jahic: They do color pencil drawings of youtube videos. At Scope Basel, they showed the installation 'Star Wars Kid' of 2009. It consists of 605 framed drawings of a short youtube video. I like this work very much, as it illustrates the overload of pictures available from the internet.

The artist told me that they are currently negotiating to sell this work to youtube for CHF 120,000.--

A very different work could be seen at thee booth of Turkish gallery x-ist: The young Turkish artist Canan Senol showed the series: 'Perfect Beauty' of 2009. It is about the perfect features a traditional Turkish woman was expected to have: Darkness, Roundness, Tightness, Smallness, Breadth, Length and Redness. She comments on them by ironic drawings. I like the work - I just think the small drawings (35 x 50 cm) are somewhat expensive (€ 7,500) for an emerging artist.

The Swiss gallery Kashya Hildebrand showed the Russian artist Andrei Molodkin. He is also featured in the Russian pavilion of the current Venice Biennale. He does words in acrylic filled with crude oil. He says today the demand and greed for raw materials, like oil, overlays everything else in life.

There was an interesting installation by the Brooklyn based artist group 'Ghost of a Dream' (Adam Eckstrom and Lauren Was): For 'Dream Home', they created a detailed bourgeois living room out of $ 70,000 worth of loosing lottery tickets.